horror

While trying to fight off a nasty virus of some sort, I spent the better part of last weekend watching old episodes of Kolchak: The Night Stalker. As I reacquainted myself with the original TV movies and some of my favorite episodes of the subsequent series, I began thinking of other famous supernatural investigators and created a brief presentation with the new presentation editor, Prezi (still in private beta). The resulting images and texts can be found here, and if you follow the path by clicking the “next” arrow, they will even display in chronological order. Enjoy . . .

Update:

For a project I’ve been working on, I’ve been compiling a list of occult detectives and have made it publicly available and editable. Please check it out and feel free to add to it!

Ok–it’s not a ghost story, and it’s not season specific. I’m simply referring to the old custom of telling scary stories at Christmas time. Here’s one I wrote, titled “Le Péril Vert”, that originally appeared in the Nov. 2007 issue of The Willows.

Ed‘s comment on rephotography in my last post reminded me of Chris Perridas’ blog, H.P. Lovecraft & His Legacy. I’ve been following it for quite awhile, and during that time, Perridas has unflaggingly posted a photo, letter, article, or some other piece of Lovecraftiana every day. While stopping by, be sure to check out some of his other blogs, particularly the Antiquarian Weird Tales one.

“From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent. Sometimes it enters directly into the composition of the events, while sometimes it relates only to their fortuitous position among persons and places. The latter sort is splendidly exemplified by . . . the ancient city of Providence . . .”

–H.P. Lovecraft, “The Shunned House”

As I was driving through Providence, RI the other evening, on my way to dinner with some fellowTEI Workshop attendees, I couldn’t help but think about H.P. Lovecraft and the various stories he wrote portraying this city, his home throughout his brief life. The streets and scenes I saw seemed almost familiar to me thanks to the Master’s portrayal of his city in such stories as “The Shunned House”, which begins by tracing the walks of Edgar Allan Poe when he was courting Sarah Helen Whitman, and “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”, in which both colonial and modern Providence act almost as characters within the story.

Some would likely argue that this injection of verisimilitude assists in making the more horrific elements of these fantastic stories that much more intense, and I would not disagree with them. But, I think, more specifically, in Lovecraft’s case, that by drawing on his encyclopedic knowledge of such an old American city as Providence, Lovecraft is emphasizing that even the trappings of civilization that seem so ancient to his readers, are really nothing in comparison to the vaster, far more ancient chaos of the universe and that these artificial constructs of humanity can be erased at any moment. I also believe that Lovecraft is not alone in this use of realistic, local geography in his horror tales and can think of parallels in the London strolls of Arthur Machen‘s various protagonists and even the North African settings of Paul Bowles. I’m sure readers of this blog can come up with more examples.

At the end of Tod Browning’s Freaks (at about 1:03 in the clip below), as the freaks chase down Cleopatra to exact their revenge, there is a particularly creepy scene that shows the armless and legless Human Torso crawling along the muddy ground with a dagger clenched between his teeth.

I always get goosebumps when I see that and can never help wondering what the Torso would look like in action. W.C. Morrow’s short story, “His Unconquerable Enemy” (originally published in the Mar. 11, 1889 issue of The Argonaut), goes a long way toward answering that question. It features an avenger in a similar physical state and a morally bankrupt first-person narrator who may be even scarier. Well worth reading.

Kudos to the Thomas Lovell Beddoes Society for making its journal, Doomsday, openly accessible using John Willinsky’s OJS software. There’s no content available yet, but I imagine it will be there soon, since I received my print copy of the latest issue a couple of weeks ago.

Last Halloween, I wrote a post featuring the BBC television adaptation of M.R. James’ “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”. Last night, I was lucky enough to stumble across its adaptation of his story, “A Warning to the Curious”, and didn’t want to wait until next Halloween to mention it.

Like the other short film, this production was part of the BBC’s “Ghost Story for Christmas” series. It takes more liberties with the plot than “Whistle”, but all of these are dramatically effective and, in conjunction with some striking incidental music, help to create a real atmosphere of menace that persists throughout the entire film.

My short story, “Le Péril Vert”, about an artist’s increasingly disturbing absinthe binges, has been published in the November issue of The Willows magazine.This magazine, named after an Algernon Blackwood story, first appeared last May and is dedicated to “assembling the finest in classic-style weird fiction.”*Now, I haven’t yet read the issue in which my story is appearing, but I have read the magazine’s first issue and was very impressed.Several of its stories were reminiscent of very early Weird Tales pieces, such as “Fool’s Gold” by Cheryl Nantus, and there was also a nod to Victorian science fiction, “The Incident at the 27th Meeting” by Chris Paul, and even a sort of Nathaniel Hawthorne pastiche, “Mercy Hathaway Is a Witch” by Ken Goldman.My story aside, this is definitely a publication the readers of this blog should look into.

Here is another short video for this Halloween, based upon Frank Belknap Long’s famous short story “The Hounds of Tindalos”. The story, first published in Weird Tales in 1929, is significant not only for its quality but for being the first to actually add an entity to H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Though they had met before through their amateur press connections, Lovecraft and Long became close friends while Lovecraft was living in New York, and Long was a founding member of the Kalem Club, which was the literary circle Lovecraft cultivated during his brief exile from Providence. “The Hounds of Tindalos” is Long’s most famous supernatural tale, and I very much wanted to provide a scan of it. However, it is still under copyright, so I’ve decided to post this video instead.

In the original story, which can still be obtained here, a writer and expert on the occult summons his friend to his apartment in order to take notes for an experiment. The experiment involves ingesting a drug in order to psychically travel through the fourth dimension in order to witness both the beginning and end of time. Needless to say, something goes wrong, the writer is observed, and after being awakened by his friend, the man is pursued by the “hounds” of the title. These can only enter our dimension through the angled intersections of surfaces, but not through curves. The writer’s only hope lies in using papier-mâché to round out the corners of his flat before the hounds can enter.

The animated version is a sort of sequel to the original, in that it presents an investigation into the tragic results of the above experiment and then perpetuates them.

It appears Halloween is creeping up on me again, and it’s high time I posted some seasonal goodies. Last year, I wrote a post about a story many consider to be the greatest ghost tale ever written, M.R. James’ “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”. The other evening I was lucky enough to stumble across the above adaptation of the story, which first aired on the British TV show, Omnibus, in 1968. Though it’s a bit slow getting started, when the crisis comes about midway through, it is truly disorienting and frightening. This is one of the best film adaptations of James I’ve seen (and I’ve seen Night of the Demon more times than I can count).

Note: Due to the size of the AVI file, it may be better to simply go to the site and download it, rather than dealing with an excessive amount of buffering.